Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.

I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.

I have come with this message: since our gods and our aspirations are no longer anything but scientific, why shouldn't our loves be so too?

The repulsive actions of the person who abused you do not identify you.

Of course, Jules was not a wolf. She was an elephant. But Jules was a very young toy and she had never been to school to learn the difference.

We must be willing to say what the Bible says.

Picture anybody growing up so stupid he didn't know that hope is just another phase you'll grow out of.

I want the part of you that you refuse to give.

We are all proud of is World War II where we went in, we were decisive, we came to the conclusion that freedom prevailed, and we were heroes.

People need to stand up hold hands, talk about alternatives. Alternatives, alternatives, alternatives. And people united will never, ever be defeated.

It means so much being a part of country music and the Opry.

You don't have to be alone to feel alone.